While it does incorporate incubator type qualities, the two emphasize that invite-only Sunfire Offices is not a incubator,“We’re optimizing for the quality of people, since they’re what really matter in a start-up,” says Wong. They wanted to “avoid the problem often associated with incubators: the theory that stronger startups don’t need an incubator so the startups that apply to incubators tend to be weaker ones, resulting in incubators naturally selecting for poorer startup performance.”

Looking for “aggressively productive individuals” as residents, Wang emphasizes that applicant pedigree doesn’t matter. But the the inevitable Google and Facebook connection is strong, “due to our backgrounds, we are able to source from a very high-quality pool – Niniane knows all the great early engineers at Google, and I know everyone from PayPal and Facebook.”